While I wholeheartedly agree this as a general concept, I find it tricky to accomplish in practice. Ianal, but afaik in general your employer owns the ip, and as such publishing it as oss requires explicit permission. And getting that permission often is difficult, needs to go through endless red tape and legal departments etc.

> In the United States, United Kingdom, and several other jurisdictions, if a work is created by an employee as part of their job duties, the employer is considered the legal author or first owner of copyright.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire

That being said, I do think open source work (maintenance/development) should happen by salaried professionals instead of volunteers begging for donations. The big question is how to make that happen, how to get companies accept oss contribution as standard practice instead of something that needs separate individual negotiating.

> While I wholeheartedly agree this as a general concept, I find it tricky to accomplish in practice.

The problems you are describing are not actually "problems in practice", as you say. They are theoretical problems.

In practice: You can just do stuff. There is no subroutine on your computer stopping the git push. In practice: Employers just write stuff in their employement contracts. They'll write everything they possibly can, to cover asses in every possible direction. If they're allowed to just write stuff, why aren't you allowed to just do stuff? Nothing matters. In practice: Roughly zero open source projects have had their IP challenged because of this technicality.

> Ianal, but afaik in general your employer owns the ip, and as such publishing it as oss requires explicit permission

If any of the work is related to what you do for your job this is true.

If the work is not related to the job it depends on the state. Many states have limitations on what employers can claim as their IP. Generic contracts will try to claim everything because they keep the language broad, but laws often say that an employer can't claim work you did in your free time if it wasn't related to the employer.

If you do the work during work hours or you use the company laptop, they would have a claim to it. Most companies aren't going to care, but you shouldn't get relaxed about this because you want to keep everything clean if a dispute arises.

Do the work on your own time, on your own hardware, and don't overlap the work you're hired to do or anything you might have been exposed to during your time at work.

>> While I wholeheartedly agree this as a general concept, I find it tricky to accomplish in practice. Ianal, but afaik in general your employer owns the ip, and as such publishing it as oss requires explicit permission.

IANAL but if you give your co-worker a copy to run, you've just used the OSS license to be able to do that right? The co-worker now has legal rights granted by the license right? Including to redistribute your changes?

This all seems really silly since pushing changes upstream is by far the best way to be sure the changes are maintained. Not to mention legal uncertainty around maintaining an internal proprietary fork.

If the current state of programming has showed anything, IP and copyright law don't exists anymore.

You don't need to push for full opensource to be able to contribute. You can negotiate time to help maintain oss packages the company IP relies upon and design your IP around creating agnostic modules that can later be released to the community.

I think the post is suggesting to follow the path of least resistance. Work on company time, try not to make many waves. If you are caught ask for forgiveness. The easy path for the company is to forgive you. If they get lawyers involved, it can get very expensive and it could become a PR nightmare for them.

In the Netherlands the law is pretty straigtforward that this is a bad idea: > The "Nature of Employment" Rule: If you are hired as a software developer, almost any software you create (even in your own time) can be claimed by your employer.

We always advise our employees to request an exception for it. We are pretty relaxed about it, but we don't give out a blanket exception

I'd personally got specific contract carveouts for this to only apply e.g. during working hours on company equipment (or even more liberal).

The GitHub liberal IP agreement is a good example of being even more chill here.

This doesn't apply to every state. In California you have the California Labor Code Section 2870 which prohibits employers from stealing workers IP.

Yeah this is a problem with the advice. On company time. They should have said "on personal time (winky face)".

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